[Revew] Downcrawl and Skycrawl

I picked up Downcrawl and Skycrawl, both by Aaron A. Reed. My overall evaluation of both is quite positive, tho' I expected not to like them when I first ran across their descriptions. A key source that gave me enough information to decide to buy them was this extract of the core Downcrawl mechanics that Reed makes freely available. I suggest you go read it to make up your own mind.

Downcrawl is 59 pages long, and contains rules for generating and administering an Underdark campaign built on point-crawl principles. The PCs move in abstracted journeys between "volumes" (collections of related sites) with tools for both generating complications and encounters on journeys, and for generating volumes, sites of interest within them, and their inhabitants.

Skycrawl is 75 pages long and uses the same basic system with a few tweaks and adaptations to generate and administer a campaign set in an endless expanse of aetheric-sky pocked with small floating islands. The islands serve the same role as "volumes" do in Downcrawl, tho' there is an additional mechanic to represent the islands moving around over time.

The journey system in each involves accumulating a resource known as "tack" through various activities (both abstract downtime activities and adventures) which combines with accumulated rumours (that the referee creates and hands out to players). The abstraction is such that most journeys, unless something goes very smoothly or very wrong, will produce 3-5 encounters moving between volumes or islands. The systems sit at a nice mid-point where they're not just "plan out three encounters and have them happen along the way" - PC choice matters - but they're also not so granular that you need to draw out the exact route that PCs use to get from one spot to another.

Both systems work using principles and formats taken from Powered by the Apocalypse. I'm not a great fan of the what I think is the modern format of PbtA "moves" where they are presented as self-contained boxes that begin with the conditions of their invocation, and the order to enact each procedure is either nested in another box or must be determined through careful reading. 

With both PbtA games more generally, and specifically with Downcrawl and Skycrawl, I would prefer the addition of a visual element to the boxes that distinguishes top-level procedures (one that are not typically called as a consequence of another procedure) from procedures that are nested within others.

Downcrawl's moves are a little easier to parse of the two because most of the procedures for travelling are listed on separate pages from one another, or at most, a procedure and its most commonly called sub-procedure are on the same page (pgs. 10-15). Skycrawl's moves (pgs. 16-20) are a little more jumbled with several small moves hidden at the bottom of the page and referring to things that require one to flip pages to sort out. In both cases, the complexity is kept in hand well enough that some careful study will bring the relations into clear view, but for me it took reading Skycrawl's moves about three times before I started to understand firmly what move gets invoked when.

It's only a small usability detail, but it's also my most serious gripe with the book, which I think speaks more generally to how useful and well-done both books are. 

The encounter procedures in both books are capable of producing highly varied results, using small nested tables built off a single roll of 3d6, with each die determining an aspect of the encounter. The tables proceed from general to more specific, more abstract to more concrete, and the examples under each result (typically four per) are a good mixture of inspiring and straightforward. 

The tables are set up so that they are meant to be used during play, rather than generating random encounters ahead of time, so a referee will need to be comfortable with improvisation to make the most of them, and you'll want to note any unusual results beforehand and ensure you have suitable monsters prepared.

Each book contains a different alchemy system. In Downcrawl, you're mixing up harvested fungus to produce various drugs and potions, while Skycrawl has you gathering magical sediment that also serve as the main form of transportable wealth. Both systems seem set up to basically have one or two players who are really into them, while they can mostly be ignored by everyone else (Skycrawl says this explicitly). It's worth reviewing both systems before play and deciding what kind of magnitudes and powers you want to give these potions and drugs, since they're suggestive, much like the monsters.

I haven't had a chance to playtest either yet, but I will say that these books passed a very important pre-playtest threshold, which is that they made me want to use them in a game. I'm tempted to adapt them to Openquest (the new 3rd edition just released to backers - a review forthcoming once the first round of backer revisions and errata is incorporated into the text) and run a short Downcrawl campaign as soon as I can free up the time to do so.

Once again, I'd recommend checking out the extract above before making up your mind to purchase these. If you do like one, you'll probably like the other, so I'd recommend getting both at once.

Some Suggested Reading

I've been keeping myself busy in quarantine during 2021 by reading academic papers.

Here's a few papers about games that I've found interesting recently:

No One Plays Alone (Bateman, 2017) about communities of player practice
Towards a Theory of Choice Poetics (Mawhorter, Mateas, Wardrip-Fruin, & Jhala, 2014)
Understanding Procedural Content Generation (Smith, 2014)
Player Types: A Meta-Synthesis (Hamari & Tuunanen)
Design Metaphors for Procedural Generation in Games (Khaled, Nelson, & Barr, 2013)

And one that isn't directly about games but bears on the issue of choice:

Cognitive Economics and the Functional Theory of Stress (Wolfendale, 2018)

I'm not rereading this, but it's an important, short paper about contemporary game design theory which I've talked about elsewhere that I strongly recommend if you're at all interested in designing games:

MDA: A Formal Approach to Game Design and Game Research (Hunicke, LeBlanc, & Zubek, 2004)

Right at the start of the year, I read this book, which I found to be excellent:
Games: Art as Agency by C. Thi Nguyen

Also, check out these two videos by Nguyen that explain elements of the book and combine them with social epistemic analysis: Games, Public Policy, and the Pandemic and Why Games are Good but Gamification is Terrible)

I've put Brian Sutton-Smith's The Ambiguities of Play on my to-read list, since he's the guy who first coined the idea of a "play culture", a term I've used a lot over the past decade and a half, but haven't actually started it yet. It's more strictly about play than games (an important distinction!) but I'm hoping there's some good stuff in there.

In other news, I am currently in two D&D 5e games. I don't love 5e, but the groups are good. One is the same group that I'd been playing 3.x with since early 2018, just switched over to 5e. The other one is a long-running group (20 years) that I've temporarily joined.

Digestive Cookies and Barbie Clothes

I was talking with Jojiro of Dungeon Antology yesterday about designing dungeons for 5e, and while doing that I used the terms "digestive cookies" and "Barbie clothes" and then had to explain them. I thought I might as well share them for others to use.

Digestive Cookies

A digestive cookie outside of games is a something that looks delicious but is actually good for you. In a game, it's a small interactive element presented as a problem even tho' there is no actual risk, the purpose of which is to cultivate useful habits in low-risk situations.

That sounds confusing but I think it's can be illustrated clearly with a few examples.

1) An ancient mural is covered in dust that obscures its subject. The PC is tempted to clean it off and reveal what's underneath because it's a mural (PCs love murals). After they move to do so, you say something like "This will require touching it with your bare hands, are you sure?" and then after a moment's panic or so, if they still wipe it off, you reveal that there was no trick or poison or anything. 

2) There is a loose cat doing something adorable nearby (cats are great when you haven't prepped anything). The PCs stop and interact with the cat for a moment, and you're like "It seems hungry and dirty". The PCs debate a few options before realising the cat is not their responsibility, at which point it wanders off.

3) The PCs are in a dungeon and there is a two foot wide crack in the earth giving off vapours. You ask them how they plan to cross it, and each person takes a turn describing how they get across. When one of them is going across, the notice a gleam down in the steam. If one of them is brave enough to reach down through the vapours into the crack, they can pull up a single gold piece.

These are all very minor, somewhat silly examples, but they inculcate a practice of interaction with the environment and serve as minor opportunities to demonstrate bravery, a command of salience, and provide a moment of characterisation. Digestive cookies almost always appear in "empty" dungeon rooms in a Gygaxian sense, tho' they're also quite common in city adventures. They usually serve as a good opportunity to convey atmosphere at the same time as they make the environment interactive beyond a strict matrix of challenge or risk.

Barbie Clothes

Barbie clothes are mechanically-meaningless cosmetic rewards you can give players, sometimes in the form of loot, sometimes in the form of scars or other changes. A cloak that billows in a cool way, or an eyepatch with a design etched in silver, or a beautiful but near worthless vase or a title of nobility that conveys no real power or authority or wealth are all types of Barbie clothes.

 Once, in a campaign, a PC got sprayed with an alien acid, and even after the wound was healed, the flesh on his chest was translucent. Another got his skin burnt off and wore a silver skin-tight nanosuit as her new flesh. That's Barbie clothes. I think they achieve their greatest effects when they are used to soften a PC failure, or when they incentivise PC action (perhaps the cloak is on a statue in the dungeon that they have to loot it from).

5e Dungeons

This all came up in the context of talking about 5e dungeon design, as mentioned above. I'm currently playing in two 5e games (and am shortly to join a Swords and Wizardry game as a PC to keep my old-school cred intact). Because of the centrality of combat to the pacing of 5e dungeon exploration, I think 5e dungeons need a lot more "empty" rooms where there are various kinds of environmental interactivity that don't deplete resources or force agonizing decisions. Barbie clothes and digestive cookies are two ways (of several) that I introduce that interactivity without simultaneously slowing everything down with resource attrition.

Trapplications II

Five years ago, I wrote the original Trapplications post. After years of updating it based on use, it's time to present the more streamlined version I've adopted. This version is better for stocking and restocking dungeons, while also remaining usable in play as a "wandering trap" table.

To recap: To use this table, you roll 2d6 and 1d6 at the same time and the results determine which entry on the grid occurs. If using it during play, I roll about once per 10-minute exploration turn because it's easier to remember to do it that way. If I'm using it for stocking, I roll it once per room, and then once more per room every time I restock the dungeon, and occasionally for corridors with prominent room-like features.

The big update is the categories for the 1d6. I redesigned them because these ones are easier to understand and less work to create than the old set, with a clear progression in proximity, danger, and imminence between the three options on the table, and the need to only create 3 columns of content instead of a full six.

They are now:

1 - Null

2 - Null

3 - Null

4 - Signs

5 - Danger Zone

6 - Trigger

"Null" results mean nothing - no trap, no problem. These results help with stocking by ensuring that some rooms lack traps. 

"Signs" means indirect signs of the trap's operation - corpses strewn around, poison darts littering the floor, the sound of grinding gears or whirring blades far ahead. The intent is that they can be spotted ahead of the trap being an actual danger.

"Danger Zone" means one or more PCs find themselves in the area of effect of a trap that has not yet activated. When stocking, it means that trap has an area of effect that one can enter into without automatically triggering the trap. If the PCs freeze in this state they'll be fine, but the challenge is to extricate themselves without triggering the trap (perhaps by dismantling or jamming it?).

"Trigger" means that a trap triggers or is about to trigger with a PC in its area of effect. When stocking, it means a trap that can't be noticed through passive observation until it's triggered (a careful search of the area might reveal it ahead of time). 

I tend to make the entries here the actual triggers of the traps, even tho' this will require a bit of adaptation if you're using it in play when the specific object isn't necessarily present. Reusing triggers for traps helps PCs learn what kinds of things in this dungeon are likely to be dangerous and gives them an extra chance to avoid them, while also bringing a certain conceptual coherence to the traps.

The probability here is that 50% of rooms will have traps, and only 1 in 3 traps will immediately trigger without warning, which I think is frequent enough to be dangerous but not frequent enough to slam a halt on exploration. I recommend attaching "Trigger" results to interactable objects whenever possible

If you feel that's too many, I'd use a d8, push "Trigger" to 8, "Danger Zone" to 7, "Signs" to 6, add a "Broken" column at 5, and leave the rest as nulls. That reduces the number of traps that are difficult to discover beforehand to 12.5%.

"Broken" implies a trap that's been activated and not reset, or that has broken down from age. Broken traps are a great way to telegraph that there are traps around, and create a sense of danger without actually requiring time to resolve in any detail.

Here's an example of this larger table:

Happy new year!

Brief Pandemic Update

My offline 3.5 campaign shifted online in April and then came to an end in late August with a TPK and will be rebooting as a 5e game sometime in 2021. I've been invited to the same group's alternate 5e campaign, and will be joining sometime in January 2021. 

By request of several PCs, Verra is on hold until we can launch it in person (so probably spring 2021). I am floating the idea of an online Planescape-themed Pathfinder 2e game with some people on a private Discord but am currently experiencing some difficulty writing an inspiring campaign pitch for it.

I work for an organisation that does education reform and health education in low and moderate HDI countries, so as you can imagine, the past year has been a somewhat busy time for us, exacerbated by staff burnout as they go through lockdowns and quarantines, and the bulk of my writing energy during the pandemic has been going to that situation. I am a graphomaniac (a compulsive writer) so there is some leftover energy even after that, but then socialising is almost entirely text-based at this point as well, other than the occasional video call.

Therefore, it's been a perfect storm to keep the blog quiet - my gaming has been very minimal since August, and I haven't had much time or energy to write outside of work and the occasional email or Discord chat with friends. I wanted to make a short post to let people know that the blog is not dead, and will probably become more active in 2021 as my gaming picks up again. 

I'll try to get some updates in over the holidays as well. I've been thinking a bit about how Openquest is an ideal game for running a Bloodbornesque game because the active defense and short list of possible attack moves in combat match up well to creating the sort of dynamic, mobile combat that game aims for. I think with a few tweaks to the spell system, the inclusion of guns, and a modification of the basic weapons and armour list, you could probably put together something that captured its feel very well. More on that some other time.

Using 2d4 for Hit Locations in BRP

I haven't yet, but I'm going to experiment at some point with using 2d4 for hit locations in Mythras. It has seven results on a bell-curve, to match up with the seven hit locations of a character. I think you could use this to emphasise armouring certain parts of the body that are likely to be the target of strikes, without requiring a full suit of armour. 

I think this might work particularly well in games where you wanted a gladiatorial feel where a combatant has one armoured arm and leg, but it could also work in a campaign where characters were scavengers who needed to eke out combat with only a few scraps of armour. I also think this is probably easier for people who have trouble remembering the d20 table from Mythras to keep in their heads as well.

For the system I'm thinking of, you'd decide at some point before a fight which side of a character is "dominant" (the right side in right-handed characters), and thus is more likely to extend towards the enemy at any given point. The other side is the "trailing" side.

Then, the distribution would go:

2 - Trailing Arm
3 - Dominant Arm
4 - Head
5 - Chest
6 - Abdomen
7 - Dominant Leg
8 - Trailing Leg

This would make wearing a helmet and cuirass (chest and abdomen-covering) particularly valuable since about 62.5% of all hits would land on one of these three locations. This would direct most strikes to the centre line of the person. The dominant side is more at risk (25% of all hits go to it - 12.5% to the arm and the same to the leg on that side) thus motivating the next heaviest armour to be placed on it. The trailing side's limbs each only have a 6.25% of being hit, representing them being both mobile and placed furthest away from the attacker. 

If anyone has experimented with this, I'd love to hear about it. Otherwise, I'm currently on hiatus from roleplaying and when I do start up again it'll be as a PC in a 5e game, so it'll probably be in 2021 at the earliest before I can test it out.

Last Chance for the Openquest 3rd Edition Kickstarter

The Openquest 3rd Edition Kickstarter is in its last 40 hours. The PDF + POD coupon level is super cheap, at around 12.85 USD at current exchange rates. If you haven't tried Openquest before, I would suggest picking it up while you get the chance (I am not being paid or otherwise compensated for this post; I don't have an "affiliate link" or something to click on; I think I mainly bring grief rather than pleasure to the creator's life; I am doing this because I like the game and want to encourage others to discover it).

Openquest has always seemed to be criminally underrated and ignored as a game despite being one of the most mechanically straightforward versions of the Basic Roleplaying (BRP) system that runs Call of Cthulhu, Mythras, Runequest and other games. It's been around for over a decade now, and I'm really amazed more traditional players disgruntled with D&D & Pathfinder's moves towards superheroism haven't converged on Openquest. 

I think Openquest sits at a really sweet spot between the possibilities of "trad" and "OSR" styles of play, and I've used it for both successfully. Because of the variety of options for magic, it's considerably easier to "tune" it to run either high magic fantasy and low magic fantasy settings that diverge from D&D's baseline. The lack of exploding hit points means that even very weak enemies remain potential threats for much longer than in D&D. The focus on skills and the lack of classes means that a wider variety of character concepts are playable than in stock D&D. It's also humanocentric by default, which I tend to prefer in my fantasy games.

Anyhow, if you haven't previously checked out Openquest, I strongly recommend you do, and this Kickstarter is a good chance to do so very cheaply.